Cybercriminals Think Small to Earn Big

As the number of breaches increased 424% in 2018, the average breach size shrunk 4.7 times as attackers aimed for smaller, more vulnerable targets.

There were 12,449 new, authentic breaches and leaks in 2018, an increase of 424% from the year prior. But the average breach size was 216,884 records – 4.7 times smaller than in 2017.

The data comes from 4iQ's "2019 Identity Breach Report," which analyzed breaches throughout 2018 and found cybercriminals are using more sophisticated tools and against poorly secured businesses. In 2018, the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) heightened security awareness around the world. Major corporations have reviewed their data collection policies and installed systems to protect themselves from attacks and noncompliance penalties.

Small and midsize businesses can't afford to take the same measures, as they have little to no security budgets and lack skills they need to defend against cybercrime. Large companies have historically been prime breach targets, but hackers are learning they can build stores of identity attributes (email addresses, passwords, passport numbers, etc.) from small businesses.

Researchers report 14.9 billion raw identity records circulated the Web in 2018, an increase from the 8.7 billion in 2017. Researchers say that underscores the growing use of identity data for account takeover, business email compromise, and other criminal activity. Government agencies proved the largest growing exposed sector in 2018, increasing 291% from 2017.

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"Small and midsize businesses can't afford to take the same measures, as they have little to no security budgets and lack skills they need to defend against cybercrime"

Security being a cost saving mechanism and not a revenue producing mechanism it can sometimes be hard to justify the spend. Unfortunately, when the small to midsize company gets burnt by the stove (breach) the rationale is all too apparent, its just too late.

Online attackers are constantly developing new, innovative ways to break into the enterprise. This Dark Reading Tech Digest gives an in-depth look at five emerging attack trends and exploits your security team should look out for, along with helpful recommendations on how you can prevent your organization from falling victim.

It was found that dropbear before version 2013.59 with GSSAPI leaks whether given username is valid or invalid. When an invalid username is given, the GSSAPI authentication failure was incorrectly counted towards the maximum allowed number of password attempts.

** DISPUTED ** In PCRE 8.41, after compiling, a pcretest load test PoC produces a crash overflow in the function match() in pcre_exec.c because of a self-recursive call. NOTE: third parties dispute the relevance of this report, noting that there are options that can be used to limit the amount of st...

** DISPUTED ** LibTIFF 4.0.8 has multiple memory leak vulnerabilities, which allow attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption), as demonstrated by tif_open.c, tif_lzw.c, and tif_aux.c. NOTE: Third parties were unable to reproduce the issue.